Below is just a small excerpt from an article I read earlier and it gave me a lot to think about, I know we all want those laser edges ( Me included ) that makes the hair just melt away but at what point do we say enough is enough ?

For the straight razor shaver, the honing options have become rather bewildering over the past few years. Eighty years ago, you bought a barber’s hone and used an old belt, strap from a pair of suspenders or buggy harness as a strop. My Opa’s Riemen hung in the bathroom for decades, and I understand it came in handy for home discipline as well. The standard barber’s hone size was 5″ x 2.5″ They were sometimes longer, but most were thin enough to fit in a man’s pocket. They were typically baked in a mold, with a brand name cast into one end. The grit sizes were usually 6000 or 8000. Millions of men enjoyed comfortable shaves from razors honed on a single pocket stone and finished up on a leather strop. Some purists still swear by these two simple tools.

If you search YouTube today, you’ll see tutorials on honing a razor with Norton 4000/8000 combination and Naniwa Japanese synthetic stones or a full Shapton glass stone progression, Belgian coticules, Japanese natural stones (Jnats), South African Zulu Greys, German Thuringians or legendary Eschers (Gnats), Chinese natural stones (Cnats), Arkansas oil stones, and chromium oxide pastes on balsa or linen, diamond sprays on felt or roo, and CBN sprays on nano cloth, to list but a few options. How are you supposed to know which honing service to hire, or the stone and strop solution to invest in for maintaining your blade at home?

Can you get a shave ready edge with most, or perhaps even all of these honing options? Yup! But here’s the thing; if our forefathers enjoyed comfortable shaves with only a 6000 grit (4 micron) barber’s hone, do we actually need to go down to 0.10 microns (160,000 grit) CBN on nano cloth (or kangaroo) today, examined under a 600+ power microscope, simply because the technology now exists to offer that service? Will it shave appreciably better than what granddad had? Hmm…